“It goes to 11&#8221: Native X11 support for Mac OS X

Call it “How to bury an important announcement, Part II.” Without any fanfare, Apple released a public beta of an X11 environment for Mac OS X. Unlike third party efforts, the X11 for Mac OS X public beta provides true Aqua window management and graphics acceleration courtesy of Quartz.

(A curious thing: the pointer to Quartz Extreme on the page points to this UK page (note the URL). A hint as to the origin of the new X11 environment?)

This is cool. I was never happy with XDarwin; I couldn’t figure out how to get it running again after upgrading to 10.2, it put crap all over my filesystem in directories that weren’t visible through the Finder, and it offered whatever window manager you wanted, as long as it was an ugly old-school non-Aqua window manager. The new release also lives happily as a little package file: X11.app.

Oh yeah: for those who don’t know already, X11 is a standard GUI toolkit for Unix. A lot of graphical Unix apps, including the Gimp (a Photoshop competitor) and the original Mosaic browser, require X11 to run. With this release, Mac OS X has an even firmer claim on being able to run almost every desirable piece of Unix software.

Got your $20 check from the music industry?

SF Chronicle: CD settlement money going begging so far. According to the article, if you bought a CD, cassette tape, or vinyl record between 1995 and 2000 at a retail store, you are eligible for a piece of the settlement that BMG, EMI, Warner, Sony, and Universal paid for price fixing. Also according to the article, only about 30,000 people have filed for their share of the settlement so far. You can file a claim online at www.musiccdsettlement.com.

Sadly, the maximum amount of the settlement is $20 (per person, not per CD purchased), or I’d be a rich man.

Hedging the dimensions issue

All the links for the new products announced during the keynote are now live. I started wondering about the claim that the 12″ PowerBook is the “smallest PowerBook ever.” Surely it’s not smaller than an iBook? or a Duo?

Here are the dimensions as they stack up. Steve wasn’t idly boasting, but it depends on how you cut the figures:

Dimension PowerBook Duo 210 iBook PowerBook G4 12″
Width (inches) 10.9 11.2 10.9
Depth (inches) 8.5 9.06 8.6
Thickness (inches) 1.4 1.35 1.18
Volume (cubic inches) 129.7 136.99 110.6
Weight (pounds) 4.2 4.9 4.6
Image PowerBook Duo 210 White iBook - 12 inch PowerBook G4 - 12 inch

So the new 12″ PowerBook is a little deeper and heavier than the old Duo 210, but still smaller in terms of overall volume. Quibbling aside, this is pretty cool—I never thought we’d see a machine close to the Duo’s form factor from Apple ever again.

MacWorld bloggers talk hardware

Continuing with the live blog of the live bloggers: Eric says Steve is talking hardware, including laptops: 17 inch Powerbooks, only 1 inch thick:

1440×900 resolution, 16:10 ratio. Fiber-optic backlit keyboard. 6.8 pounds. Aircraft-grade aluminum. 1 GHz G4 and FireWire 800.

Will all bloggers lust after the new AlBook like they did the TiBook? Have to wait to see the photos. If Apple succeeds in improving AirPort performance over the TiBook they might have a winner.

Dammit I posted too fast. Looks like it will incorporate AirPort Extreme: 802.11g (54 MB/sec, baby) as well as BlueTooth (Eric and Matthew).

Double dammit. New Airport Extreme base stations for $199, 802.11g, with USB print server. Oh well. The SMC works fine. <sob>

“One more thing” — Matthew: “…New 12″ Powerbook. Smallest powerbook ever. Full sized keyboard. 867 MHZ G$. Bluetooth built in. Airport Extreme ready. Cost: 1799$.”

Other coverage: Daniel Berlinger of Archipelago.

A real-time MacWorld blogger

Dave points to Matthew Langham, who is blogging the keynote real time. First big announcement: “FinalCut Express. Looks really neat (from the demo). How much will it cost? 299$ Wow!” Matthew also notes that watching Steve demo iMovie 3 (announced along with iPhoto 2) is “boring.” Sounds familiar.

Additional announcements: iLife, an integrated suite of iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes. Free; $49 with iDVD. Safari, a new Mac OS X browser, supposedly “fastest Mac browser ever,” including Google on the toolbar. Unclear whether this is the true Google toolbar or just a search box. Also unclear whether this is the long rumored Apple version of Chimera, a Cocoa browser based on the Mozilla code base. Also unclear whether Microsoft will still want to play in the Mac sandbox after this… A note: if I have to choose between speed and standards support, I’ll just use Chimera instead, which is plenty fast for me…

Other real-time bloggers: Eric, who notes the QuickTime stream isn’t great even if you can access it, and Frank.

Hmm, Matthew says Steve says they used KHTML, from the KDE library, and will donate back all the additions they make. Also to send them the URL for any page that doesn’t render correctly. Heh. Hope: that they are using this as the basis of a new Cocoa class for HTML rendering; the current one suxx0r. Glad to read in the KHTML notes that it “mostly” implements CSS and DOM.

Hmm… Keynote, a new presentation app, according to Frank. Eric: import/export PowerPoint, export QuickTime, PDF, and XML. $99.

Just a quick foolish note: here I am blogging in real time a bunch of folks blogging in real time. Dave: looks like Weblogs.com is standing up to all the blogging traffic quite well, despite having hit a high water mark.

Helpful Quicktime streaming tip

Courtesy Indiana University:

10061 : Connection Failed Error
Some users may experience a “10061 – Connection Failed” error. This is usually due to an incorrect streaming transport setting on the player and is easy to fix.

From the desktop, double-click on the QuickTime Player icon to open the application (or from the Windows Start menu: Start/Programs/QuickTime/QuickTime Player). From the Edit menu, choose Preferences, then Streaming Transport. A QuickTime Settings window will open with two transport settings to choose from. If you are not behind a firewall, select “Use UDP, RTSP Port ID 554” (the top one), or if you are behind a firewall that does not allow port 554, select “Use HTTP, Port ID: 80.” Then close the QuickTime Settings window. If both of these settings work on your computer, UDP is the preferred setting for optimal performance.

Of course this doesn’t help my problem: “500 (Connection refused).” Looks like I won’t be watching any of the speech after all.

Keynote watch

Last year at this time I was live-blogging the MacWorld SF 2002 Apple keynote from the Apple Store in McLean, Virginia. I don’t think I’ll be repeating that feat this year; for one thing I’m working today, and for another I very much doubt I’ll actually get access to a good feed of the keynote, our company’s firewall being what it is. But I will try to make a few notes about the announcements, if only for professional reasons.

Google dance… I exist again

A while ago, I griped about the difficulties of moving to a new domain—in particular, Google kept pointing everyone to my old site. That seems to be in the process of correcting itself. I knew we were getting closer when I started seeing a lot more referrals to my site from Google and its search affiliates. But as of today, the handy-dandy PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar shows that this incarnation of my site has moved up to 5 out of 10. (Of course, my old site at editthispage.com is still 6 out of 10, but that will drop off as the content becomes staler and staler.) Also, the quick search test (ego-surfing for my own name on this site, vs. at my old site) is much less out of whack; the old site now shows 6,940 hits, vs. 7,830 at the new site.

This seems to be what is meant by the term “Google dance.” I guess the master index got updated in the last few days.

Skiless in Seattle

We had planned to go skiing this weekend—for me, it would have been the first time skiing since high school—but reality intervened. First, taking down the tree took much, much longer than expected. Second, we woke up on Sunday, looked at each other, and said, “Maybe we’d better go sightseeing instead.” (This week was also the week we started going to the gym again, and I don’t think either of us felt up to a day on the slopes yet.)

In our defense, the snow isn’t great here yet. The relative drought we’ve had in Seattle this fall and winter has also affected snowfall at the skiing resorts. On Friday the western section of Snoqualmie Pass had only about 40 inches of base. (I’m told that’s not a lot.)

So we drove north, since we hadn’t explored in that direction yet, to Bellingham. Which, coincidentally, is the home of Orchard Street Brewing Company. Which, sadly, turns out to be closed on Sundays. Ah well: another time, perhaps…

Chopping out character: Clones outtakes

Yes, I finally got around to watching Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones on DVD. Including the second disc material. Including all the material cut from the film. Which turns out to be, in large part, dialog that establishes character. Discussions between Padmé and Anakin that brings out her past life choices, between Padmé and her parents(!) that establish that she is a person with a family and a history, and parents who think she should have been married a long time ago. In other words, scenes that establish the Queen/Senator as a person.

“It’s emotionally touching, it gives her a lot of character, but in terms of moving the story along it isn’t necessary.” —George Lucas

Any surprise that all these scenes died? This is where the missing heart of the film is, for me, the stuff that makes the awkward adolescent fawning between Padmé and Anakin bearable. And of course they got cut out. Because the target audience—kids who will buy the action figures—won’t care.

I’m not sure whether this makes me feel better or worse about Star Wars as a universe. I know how it makes me feel about Lucas’s skills as a moviemaker.

Licensed to blog

I’ve added a reference to the new Creative Commons license for the contents of this website to my template; scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar and it’s there. What does this license mean? Essentially it makes explicit the terms under which most bloggers have always made their content available: anyone can copy, distribute, display or perform the contents of the weblog, provided they give me credit. No one can use the contents of my website for commercial purposes without my permission. And no one can create an altered or otherwise derivative version of my website. The full text of the license is also available.

Creative Commons has made it very easy to decide which of their licenses (currently there are eleven available), and to apply the license to your content.

Creative Commons License

Small culinary confession

I was busting George’s chops earlier about scrapple, but I had to ignore a small voice inside my head that said, “hypocrite bloggeur! —mon semblable, —mon frère!”

Yes, I too am guilty of desiring unidentifiable meat products. In particular, ring bologna, which is similar to summer sausage in taste but not form. I used to eat a half-pound of this stuff at one sitting. On Triscuits. Hey, I was young.

Anyway, I was amused to find quite a few online sites for ordering both ring bologna and scrapple, including Stoltzfus, which sells both products in holiday gift boxes (still available, though Christmas has passed by) or individually. If you’re ordering scrapple or ring bologna on line, I think you’d have to do it from Stoltzfus, since not only do they have a fine Dutch (as in Pennsylvania Dutch, or Deutsch) name, but also an address in the fine town of Intercourse, PA.

Hey, I’m not making this stuff up. Other towns in Lancaster include Paradise, Bird-in-Hand, and Blue Ball. My parents were gifted on their wedding day (at Leacock Presbyterian in Paradise) with a set of road signs measuring the distances to each of these towns, in case they got lost on the way to their honeymoon destination. After all, as it is written, “In order to get to Paradise you have to see Bird-In-Hand, enter Gap, then go through Intercourse without reaching Blue Ball.”